“I just can’t get you out of my head”– musical hallucinations and Phantom Voices

Most of us can recall familiar music in our heads; some of us can imagine original music. But when that musical imagination spills over into musical intrusions, earworms or hallucinations, the experience can be disorientating at best, and at worst frightening. Recipients of a Wellcome Trust Arts Award, vocal ensemble The Clerks, present a new performance piece entitled ‘Phantom Voices’, a provocative take on the phenomenon of musical hallucinations. Edward Wickham, who devised the project, explains more…

Many of us experience what might be called ‘musical imaginings’ in the form of the everyday phenomenon of the ‘earworm’ which has led to surveys concluding, unsurprisingly, that Kylie Minogue’s “I just can’t get you out of my head” is a leading contender. But there is much greater range: from the musician or composer who is capable of controlling and manipulating her musical imaginings, through to the person who hears music as if from an external source and cannot control it. The spectrum is wide and yet there is still remarkably little research into the various ways musical imagination operates.

In an attempt to address this, we’ve joined forces with Charles Fernyhough and his ‘Hearing the Voice’ team at the University of Durham to find out whether the conditions that provoke musical hallucinations are similar to those associated with voice-hearing.

We also want to improve our understanding of how we remember and imagine music in our heads. We want to explore questions such as: do musical hallucinations have something of the same quality as verbal hallucinations? To what extent are they a function of memory, and to what extent are they an expression of a creative imagination?  We want to explore the various ways in which our musical imagination can spill out, become undisciplined and uncontrolled.

We are doing this in two ways. Hearing the Voice have set up a questionnaire to gather people’s experiences of musical imaginings, which you can complete online. But we have also developed a musical programme – a concert presentation featuring music old and new. Working with composer Christopher Fox, we lead our audience through a series of musical ‘hauntings’, a sequence of interrelated songs, all stemming from the same source, which take us from the present back into the Middle Ages, via Bach, Heinrich Isaac, bluegrass, a Victorian temperance song and folk song. Each song is a re-imagining of the original, appropriating material from the song but reinventing it in different idioms.

At the same time, the audience will also be haunted more directly, by pre-recorded speech – including the testimony of people who have direct experience of the phenomenon – music and sampled noises, to evoke the experience of voice and music hallucinations. Members of the audience are encouraged to download an MP3 track and listen to it simultaneously with the performance.

We encourage you to get involved – either by participating in the online questionnaire or attending one of our performances.

Join us at Spitalfields Music Winter Festival on Monday 15th December at 9.30pm – we look forward to seeing you there.

To find out more about this Wellcome Trust funded project please visit the Phantom Voices website. Find out more about voice hearing in Mosaic’s podcast documentary Voices in the Dark, featuring the Hearing the Voice team and other researchers looking at the phenomenon. Charles Fernyhough and his team also took part in a Reddit AMA, answering questions about hearing voices and their research. 

Photo credits: The Clerks (top and bottom images), Musical Notes – by Epic Fireworks on Flickr, CC-BY